PPLS ARCHIVES

Spring 2009

The following lectures and workshops, which are free and open to the public, are co-sponsored by Reed College and the Portland Center for Public Humanities, a Portland State University-based consortium of over 100 scholars in the Portland metropolitan area.

Bruce Robbins
“Chomsky as Extraterrestrial”

Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, works mainly in the areas of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York University, 1999), The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia, 1986; Duke, 1993), and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics and The Phantom Public Sphere, and co-edited Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Robbins was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000. He has a forthcoming book on upward mobility stories, and is working on another about cosmopolitan fiction.

Saskia Sassen
“The World’s Third Space: Neither Global nor National”

Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, focuses on the social, economic, and political dimensions of globalization; cities and terrorism; new, networked technologies; and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. She is the author of A Sociology of Globalization (W.W. Norton, 2007), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, 2006), and Cities in a World Economy (3rd. ed. Sage/Pine Forge, 2006). She has edited Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales, and Subjects (Routledge, 2006) and co-edited Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton, 2005). Sassen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Panel on Cities. She serves as a member of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought and is a centennial visiting professor at the London School of Economics.